What eyes can't see
by Gwenchan93
Summary: Victorian!AU. Rose and Céline could have met in a tearoom. Or on the train. Or while walking down the street. In a tons of different places. Instead there's only a mental asylum with its horrors. [Nyo!Fruk]


What eyes can't see

The pill was white and smooth, slightly smaller than an almond candy and as innocent in appearance. Rose, however, had seen what effects might have that medicine that doctors were concerned with giving to all the inmates, no differentiation at all, every morning and evening.

It was that small pill to drive Anya to choke Sofja with a pillow and then to crash her skull against the bed by dwelling head-butts.

Rose was sure about it. Anya might have been a little strange, prone to strong and sudden mood swings, but she would've never killed anyone. She was spared the show, but she heard that poor Russian girl's face had become unrecognizable.

Rose looked at the doctor, whishing she could incinerate him with her bare stare; then she forced herself to bring her fist to her mouth and to let the pill slid into it. She framed it quickly between teeth and intern cheek, pretending to swallow.

The doctor, far from persuaded, made her open her mouth, but Rose was used to such a routine and had become a very good faker.

Alone again, she spat the pill in the palm of her hand and hid it in a tear in the mattress lining. At least until Céline hadn't come to throw it away.

Rose curled in bed, fingers stuck in her ears for not hearing the never-ending monologue of the girl in the bed next to hers or the weeps of another girl who couldn't have been older than sixteen.

The night before Céline hadn't visited her, nor the one before or the one before that. Rose started to worry.

Above all, she couldn't stop thinking about Sofja's cyanotic hand, peering from the white cloth while they carried her away; Sofja, who trembled always like a leaf, but had also a big mouth.

Anya had crashed her head against the bed.

Rose wasn't mad. She wrote it in the air. She traced it with her fingers on the wall. She told the other inmates, even if their ears were swamped by nightmares.

She'd told Sofja, speaking slowly for her understanding, before Anya killed her.

She'd told Anya too.

She'd told the doctors, but they refused to listen, more worried to see her as a lab rat for their ramblings than to treat her like a person.

The room sheet were dirty, the air musty. Rose thought about the day her mother had re-married, with a smile so forced her heart hurt. Her mum had looked at her and her sisters, as she was pleading them to intervene, to stop her from doing such foolishness. Neither Rose nor her sisters had lifted a finger.

If her mum hadn't married that man, she wouldn't have been dragged to asylum. Her father, her real father, would've never allowed that. Her father was like her, a severe yet kind man, a grocer who on Sundays, after mass, used to take all the family out for a stroll in the woods.

He could see fairies too.

Her father would have never let two strong male nurses drag her away.

Rose had tried to tell doctors she wasn't mad, that fairies existed, that they could've seen them if they only wished for.

The passion lit in her eyes was mistaken for madness. They gave her a sedative and Rose woke up in prison.

Sofja was choked in her sleep.

On the wall behind Anya's bed the bloodstain was still visible.

Rose wasn't mad, but if it weren't for Céline she would've become. Fairies showed even more rarely, swift and scared, like fragments from a dream. Sometimes she found herself doubting they had ever existed and they hypothesis that, maybe, who said they were just illusions was right, carved in her brain, like a mole.

Céline was beautiful, audacious and rebellious. She had already reached and almost surpassed the age when a girl had to marry for not giving rise to gossips, but she didn't care. On the contrary, she didn't hid having more than one occasional lover or pleasing her body by herself when needed.

There was enough for intern her in asylum.

Still, despite her apparently unregulated life, Céline was fit as fiddle. She was a good nurse too.

"Why did you come to London?" Rose asked her once, when their relation started the delicate transition from mere acquaintance to real affection.

"The war," she answered, telling her about how her parents had spent every last penny to pay her a passage across the Channel, before the Kaiser's army laid siege in Paris and the Commune inflamed the passions.

Céline smelled clean. Her well-starched uniform didn't fit well her soft body. Rose sat on the bed.

Rose Kirkland had the longest and most beautiful hair Celine Bonnefoy had ever seen. To comb them was a joy for the woman and a relief for Rose, although she pretended coldness. She used to kneel on the bed, feet under her buttocks and to stay still, while Celine did her hair in a various set of fancy hairdo.

"I like being with you," was the sentence that sometime interrupted the otherwise complete silence of those moment – as far as one could call "silence" that, always disturbed by background noised from other inmates.

Rose had been recovered in that psychiatric facility three years before; about the same period Celine started her internship as a nurse. At the time she had wondered why someone would've wanted to intern such a posed and quiet girl. On her clinic dossier it was said she was prone to hallucinations. Still those beautifully handwritten sentences hadn't bought her.

She sees things that don't exist, she lives in a world of fantasies, and she can't take care of herself.

"I'm not mad," Rose whispered, interrupting the flow of her thoughts. Celine put down the comb and caressed her cheek.

"Oh, no, no, you are not. You're the most lucid and calm person I've ever known," she reassured her, voice a little goofy. Rose wasn't a person with whom one could use some blandishment and some sweet words to sweep her of her feet.

Céline didn't wish for it either.

She smiled gently. Rose's cheek was cold against her hand, her skin white as porcelain.

Rose sniffed a couple of time and wiped her green eyes. Seeing her crying, Celine's heart clenched with rage, and then opened for a new and gentle feeling she hadn't felt in a long time. It was so different from what she felt with her occasional lovers. It must have grown without her noticing, just like her relationship with Rose.

Love.

It was blossoming love in all its simplicity, arising from her lower belly to fill her bosom.

There had been a time when she considered her just a spoiled and stiff girl, boring for her watching everyone from above her glasses.

A time when Rose avoided her.

There was a time when the only words they exchanged were subtle vitriolic insults. Then Rose's defensive wall had started to crumble, allowing Céline to sneak her head into, just to peek into the little Englishwoman's true nature, and to discover there was a rebellious fire burning under the ashes.

She loved Rose; she loved the time she spent with her, her snobbiness as her deep culture.

"There is a fairy, on your shoulder," Rose told her and Celine, already on the verge of kissing the girl, pulled back and turned. Her shoulder was empty with void.

"There is n-"

But then she remember how sad and destroyed Rose had seemed, how dull were the doctor voices talking about her illness, about the need to fix her, as she was a toy, and how little mattered the fact that she saw the world differently from all the others. Whether Rose's fairies were real or just a product of her mind, what mattered was the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about them. Celine held her hands.

"You're right. It's a beautiful fairy, but you've ever more beautiful."

Rose diverted her sight, not answering. She knew Céline's passion for seduction tricks, her love for playing roles to please the counterpart – she had seen her use it both with doctors and some nurse.

The point was that at the moment Céline wasn't flirting.

Céline used to laugh when she aimed someone.

Now she was as serious as death.

"You should return to work."

"Yes, right."

Céline smuggled her a small book to help her fighting boredom and kissed her on the forehead.

Rose managed to read up to page twenty before her mind started wandering again.

Sofja had been one among the many victims of that prison.

Anya had banged her head thirty-seven times. Margot, the girl who used to sleep next to her had gone crazy for real. An electric shock and she had thrown herself down the stair – only because bars prevented inmates from opening windows.

Anya would not return to her Russia anymore.

"Doctors are talking about a new therapy. They want to try it on relapsed inmates," Céline announced a few days later, while combing her hair. Rose was sitting almost in her lap, her body traversed by the kind of shivers a well-born girl is not suppose to have if the woman's bosom pressed a little against her back or if her hands ended on her thighs, albeit by chance and not by purpose.

"What is it?"

"Something with electricity."

Rose and Céline could have met in a tearoom. Or in a church. Or on the street. Or during a suffragettes' manifestation. They could have met in any other place, but there was only the asylum Rose wouldn't get out until her stepfather had stayed alive. They could have met on the train. Or while horseback riding. Or in the Metropolitan underground.

Instead there was only the asylum where Anya had choked Sofja in her sleep and banged her head thirty-seven times against the bed.

Rose couldn't see fairies anymore, only ghosts.

Smiling doctors told her she wouldn't have felt any pain. They lied. They attached two electrodes to her temples and played gods.

Rose screamed like a banshee and they increased the voltage.

"They're savages!"

Céline shook her head like she couldn't believe how stupid men could be as she applied some pomade on the burns. She became a nurse truly believing to be able to help people, but her dream had crashed when she found herself changing pots, giving pills to inmates who clearly didn't need them and watching doctors tying up others when the only clever thing to do would've been listening.

Rose neither moved nor answered the whole time; only when Céline lightly touched her hair Rose managed to snap out her trance. She blinked, her eyes dry, she focused on the woman and burst into tears.

Céline smelled nicely, of jasmine, when she held her muttering curses under her breath. She kissed her temples, rocking her to sleep.

Rose wasn't mad, but she was becoming.

Neither Anya was mad. She hadn't been until the pills had made her wake up one time like a sleepwalker – and so ignored – and to press a pillow on Sofja's face until she had stopped jerking. Doctors found her cradling the body, with her index finger on her slip as to demand silence.

"She would've left me," was the only explanation they could obtain. Savvy people would've isolated her so that she wasn't a danger for others and checked her so that she wasn't a danger for herself; who run the asylum, however, was too busy primping for society's eyes to actually care for inmates. They had Anya in a straitjacket – for safeness – and sent her again in a dorm with thirty other girls, smelling of mould and bodily fluid.

The girl had stayed quite for some days; then, without any warning, she had started banging her head against the bed. The other inmates' feeble attempts to stop her were useless. When strong male nursed had arrived Anya's face was reduced to a mush.

Thirty-seven head-butts to die. Rose saw her. Fairies stopped visiting since.

Rose wasn't mad. She had repeated it on and on to survive in a place able to drive even the most rational people crazy. Now the first doubts were gnawing that confidence.

Luckily she could see fairies again when she was with Céline. Literally. They laughed like fireflies on the windowsill, comfily sat on the nurse's chignon or cling to her clothes folds. They greeted her waving their little legs while drinking from a raindrop as it were a slushy and Rose told herself that, maybe, she wasn't mad.

Maybe she would've succeeded in making others understand. Surprising even herself, she held Céline's hands, whishing she could see with her eyes. Then she remembered how bad had been her first impression about Céline and she almost laughed.

Even if Margot had rolled down the stairs after having seen what was left of Anya. She had left written she blamed herself for not having been able to stop her.

They had carried her away showing the same care they used with the dirty laundry.

Fairies disappeared again.

Rose wasn't mad, but the stress that the place caused her, a stress she couldn't vent, planted the first seeds of neurosis, which, finding a fertile ground, grew steadily. She started to forget to not take the pills.

Rose and Céline could've met in a tearoom and become two bold Feminism icons, celebrating love in face of society.

Instead the quiet, clever girl with a sharp tongue Rose had been was leaving place to a puppet Céline was afraid to break if only she had held her too tight.

The impossibility to be alone reduced their love to a touch of fingers and quick kisses, enough to wake in Rose sensations she had never felt with the courting of any boy.

Then, one night, Céline walked to Rose's bed holding a lamp so to not wake up the other inmates lost in their oneiric and mental world. She sat on the bed edge, at first not wanting to start the other; Rose opened the eyes anyway, formulating the question with her face before than with her mouth.

"What's the matter?"

"I heard you talking in your sleep," Céline answered, voice forced out her lips.

She heard again doctors discussing about Rose, enthusiastically declaiming a new therapy that made her vomit just thinking about it. To believe that a woman uterus had any link with her mind, what a nonsense!

They would've destroyed her. They would've used her as a lab rat to experiment treatments, useless because they were born from unfounded hypothesis.

They would've fried her brain by dwelling electro-shock therapy, injections, and pills.

Céline couldn't help Rose to escape, but she could warn her. She didn't advise her to pretend the behaviour they wanted because that would've meant to admit defeat.

She blamed herself for that in the following years.

"I'm sorry. I wish I could do something."

Unexpectedly Rose intertwined fingers behind Céline's nape and brought their faces closes. She clumsy tried to straddle the woman's pelvis.

"Make with me the love you talk about so much, " she invited her, before letting Céline guiding her down again, back pressed against the mattress.

Céline was an expert and caring lover.

For a moment Rose could forget that a drunk male nurse had messed up Anya's doses and that she had suicided by banging her head thirty-seven times against the bed pommel, after having choked Sofja.

Rose wasn't neither mad nor hysteric, but she became in the asylum, mutilated in body and spirit, stuffed with pills to the point of not being able to recognize reality anymore.

"The girl I love cheated on me. She doesn't visit me anymore, but don't tell around," she told a horrified Céline, hugging a pillow. When she attempted to caress her head, Rose hissed and tried to squeeze away.

"Raised, Rose, please, please. Calm down. It's me," she whispered, trying to hold her hands and to hug her.

Rose cried even louder.

"It's ok. It's ok. I understand. After all love isn't something you can force on others."

Some day later an inmate, maybe hoping for a better and more human treatment, said and swore to have seen Céline and Rose naked and hugged together.

Céline was fired, blackmailed. She tried to visit Rose, pushing away who attempted to block her way, but was caught by two policemen and thrown in a cell.

And again.

And again.

Until she was gently invited to leave the country if she too didn't want to end her days in an asylum, where she couldn't see Rose anymore for good.

She didn't see her anymore anyway.

Rose was fed other pill, became more and more aggressive and was put in Ward, where she reduced to stare at the ceiling.

Céline was gone.

Fairies were gone.

Banshee screamed in the courtyard.

Anya had choked Sofja and killed herself when she realized she was alone.

Margot had thrown herself down the stairs.

To Rose the conclusion seemed obvious. She hang herself a few days later, thinking about her father when he brought her and her sisters in the woods on Sundays after mass, when they were kids, all in line like little ducklings.

 **Notes** :

At the beginning it shouldn't have been this dark, but then my hands slipped. I did a quick research, but not so much, I admit. Still from what I read mental asylum in Victorian England were places to run away from really fast most of the times.

When and if Rose contradicts herself is wanted.

Anya is Fem!Russia. Sofja is Fem!Latvia.


End file.
